Nonverbal communication plays an important role in mental health and human experience; its component processes have been studied from a number of different perspectives. The proposal focuses on facial expressive behavior, the phenomenological perception of physical sensations, and actual physiological changes in relationship to affective behavior. Five experiments are proposesed that embody a multidisciplinary approach. The interrelationships among these nonverbal phenomena are studied cross-culturally to determine whether pan-cultural consistencies exist in populations that do not share a common language. Particular attention is given to the possibility that gender differences exist within and/or across cultures, as has been found in other research on nonverbal communication. Experiment 1 consists of development of an instrument to assess physical sensations associated with affective experience using: (a) retrospective report in a sample diverse to gender, cultural background, and ethnicity, and (b) in vivo during three different elicitation tasks. Experiment 2 has professional actors, who can be considered to be "experts" in nonverbal communication, and nonactors relive affective memories or produce facial prototypes of emotions to study the relationships among nonverbal subsystems in the face, physiology, physical sensations, and subjective experience. Experiment 3 uses social interaction between couples from distressed and nondistressed marriages as a vehicle for studying these components of nonverbal communication as they occur naturally during conversation within an intimate relationship. Experiment 4 provides additional exploration of the physiological basis fo physical sensations. Experiment 5 tests the cross-cultural consistency of findings from previous experiments.